Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Today, I noticed that the site in question has a site-run textlink to my site in the advertising text. Checking Google, I saw that it has already indexed some 17,000 pages with an active text link to my site. That is to say, I gained 17,000 text links overnight. And this is the last thing that I would like to have for my site.
Now, there seems a positive shift from #4 to #3. But I wonder what will happen after the advertising period is over, that is to say, when the publishing site removes link to my site next month.
Will my site return to the pre-advertising levels, or will it be pushed downwards as a penalty (due to loosing 17,000 backlinks overnight)?
Most people are just trying to get a few pages indexed properly - if you already have loads of google traffic then you have something to lose.
It is possible that it would look like link purchasing - but if it isn't to your home page then you might be ok.
probably a crash in the ranking.
You will notice a big boost for about 2 weeks or so... Then another algorythm will kick in and see that you amassed all of these links over night and penalize you for them. You will be put into the "sandbox" and it will last approx one year.
Sweeping generalisation that's just plain wrong.
"You will notice a big boost for about 2 weeks or so... Then another algorythm will kick in and see that you amassed all of these links over night and penalize you for them. You will be put into the "sandbox" and it will last approx one year."
Sweeping generalisation that's just plain wrong.
Agreed that is wrong. This is a guess at best and a poor one at that in my opinion. I don't think your rankings will crash either.
what else can we do? polish our crystal ball even more?
That is what shocks me. I can believe seeing it with Yahoo but google? They won't even show 10% of the backlinks for most and definitely not more than one for one site. Very strange.
By that, I don't mean that Google shows +17000 backlinks. What I mean is this: when I run a site:othersite.com mydomainname, it shows 17,000 results. And since mydomainname is unique, it means that Google had crawled the othersite and refreshed its index. A random check of google cache showed that this is indeed the case, i.e., there is an active textlink to my site on every page.
The textlink is a site-run one without any javascript, etc. When checked with a browser, it is evident that it is an ads (with a slightly different background). But when you check the source, it appears to be an integral part of the page.
Anyway, this is a real-life (and somehow frightening) experiment for me. And we will see its net result by the end of next month.
By the way, my site went from #4 to #5 - 6 for my main kw combination. It is a pity that this happened simultaneously with the current "update" or whatever. At this moment, it is difficult to speculate as to what caused my site to bump up 1 point first, and then went down 3 points within 24 hours.
Next month, I will post the results here.
Earlier this year it did the same and even got 4,000 extra backlinks in Google for a month. Again no change in ranking or traffic. Normally it showed 36 backlinks in Google.
I thought that the sooner the links removed, the lesser my site would suffer.
I think I will not have to wait for one month or so to see the results.
To me its a good thing, traffic should go up due to more click throughs, you will rank slightly better for some keywords for a while.
After its all done, traffic, serps etc etc goes back to the norm.
I don't see a problem here.
Google I understand is only updating their SERPs about 4 times a year, so the huge time lag between Google updates could result in a huge number of new inbound links suddenly appearing all at once when they do update.
If this is true, about the only way to avoid this is to take it very slow & easy to try to keep pace with Google's infrequent updates.
I see why exactly why your worried but SERPs change and update all the time. You would have been fine if you left the links pointing to your website.
[0077] The dates that links appear can also be used to detect "spam," where owners of documents or their colleagues create links to their own document for the purpose of boosting the score assigned by a search engine. A typical, "legitimate" document attracts back links slowly. A large spike in the quantity of back links may signal a topical phenomenon (e.g., the CDC web site may develop many links quickly after an outbreak, such as SARS), or signal attempts to spam a search engine (to obtain a higher ranking and, thus, better placement in search results) by exchanging links, purchasing links, or gaining links from documents without editorial discretion on making links. Examples of documents that give links without editorial discretion include guest books, referrer logs, and "free for all" pages that let anyone add a link to a document.
If the inbound link was a valid advertising link on a site that could generate leads for your site, why would you have it removed? Don't let the fear of inbound links scare you off like that.
Surely sitewide links are discounted. And yes, they will show up in a link command, that's normal and they typically show up in the...
In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 00000 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.
What to expect next month? Probably nothing as it will take time for Google to do it's thing. Worse case scenario? The link just doesn't count. I'd take the 17,000 site wide links of advertising and not worry about what Google is going to think of it. Unless of course there is something else going on. ;)
How will Google be able to tell the difference, further more, how can someone suffer serious drops in SERPS from off site linking?
If thats the case, wouldn't a lot of people just start buying links for their competitor sites and watch them sink?
These are hypothetical questions mind you, but there are a lot of holes in this in my opinion.
Information retrieval based on historical data
[google.com...]
It sheds some light on how Google may evaluate links. ;)
Yes, Yes, Yes - We all know that google is stomping down on people buying links to increase in SERPs. So we all now know that google will not devalue your website because you bought "advertising", its more possible that google will simply just not count the "advertising" you bought in they're algos and all is well in happy pixey land once again.
<added>
If you have an hour or so
[edited by: rj87uk at 3:42 pm (utc) on June 8, 2006]
In a good way? Maybe/yes.
Today, I checked my server logs to see if I receive any traffic from that links: Zero! Yes, within a period of 7 days, my site received no visitor from that site. This is mostly due to the fact that the links appeared on irrelevant pages. Another plausible reason is that my site performs much better than the publishing site.
Currently, my site has a decent position, and drives some modest traffic from the major SEs (#1 at yahoo & MSN, and #3-6 in Google). I thought that minimal benefits (added traffic, or a minimal improvement in serps) is not worth to take the risk.
With regard to site-wide links, I am not scared of it either. Once I asked a webmaster to place a textlink to my site in the form of a thanks note for the services I delivered. She complied, generously, by placing the link in the dreamweaver template thus creating a site-wide link (the site has a home page PR6 and +500 pages). From my experience, I guess that Google may not be counting them to the full extent. But they are there, and I am happy with them. Even, I receive occasional visitors from the site.
It would be a good experiment to wait one month and see the results. But as I said above, I could not risk the site. It has a good reputation (in the eyes of SEs), and is getting better with every update.
Thank you all for the valuable comments.
I am noticing a significant increase in MSN traffic, but still getting nothing from Google.
I don't see how reciprocal links can adversely effect a site, since I know of a fellow affiliate who has exchanged hundreds of links with all kinds of unrelated sites including poker, Viagra, etc.. and he tells me he's getting plenty of traffic from Google, although his site is banned from Yahoo.
If you are a regular reader of Matt Cutts you will already understand this and more. If not, and you want greater insight into Google’s analytical capabilities, I suggest you visit Matt’s blog and catch-up on your reading.
[mattcutts.com...]
